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grassy_knoll writes "Related to the Wikileaks video recently released and discussed here, the NY Times reports: 'Somehow — it will not say how — WikiLeaks found the necessary computer time to decrypt a graphic video, released Monday, of a United States Army assault in Baghdad in 2007 that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters. The video has been viewed more than two million times on YouTube, and has been replayed hundreds of times in television news reports.'
The article is light on details; what encryption algorithm was used? Was this a brute force attack? Did someone pass the decryption keys to Wikileaks along with the video? Something else?"

Yep, they got it from an anonymous source, this "we had to haxx0r REALLY hard" story is a smokescreen. The AH-64's onboard recorders don't store this video encrypted. Either a concerned party in that unit or someone in the Pentagon leaked the video.

The video itself isn't the worst part of this story. The fact that they tried to bury it is what is really disturbing to me. You put a bunch of Army troops on the ground and give them the most lethal and effective killing machines on the planet in an urban environment and civilians ARE going to die. People who claim otherwise are lying their asses off.

Try watching it. People *inside* the armed forces leaked this. They feel its wrong enough to leak. People who were in Iraq an saw the video also think its pretty bad.

But shooting a Family that did nothing but stop to pick a wounded man on the side of the road, is nothing short of a war crime. And the "don't bring kids to battle" doesn't work when its the US that took the battle to Baghdad (Where, shock horror, families live with children).

The area had been quite for well over 5mins. Watch the unedited version. The entire city was an area with really loud cannon rounds all over the place all the time. The pilot even said they didn't have weapons but appeared to taking the wounded away, and "Fuck let us shoot". What rules of engagement is that? Lets not forget they lied about getting shot at in the first place.

Standing up for this will not help. Watch the full video, you even get a sense of the attitude between the ground forces and the airborne calvary unit.

Real soldiers who where there in Iraq are condemning these actions. Real pilots are too.

And lets not forget this is their *home city*. This is where they live, America made it a "war zone", where shooting unarmed people (by the pilots own admission) who are rescuing the wounded (a fellow country man) is apparently fair game for burst of 30mm cannon rounds by the American version of the rules of engagement.

If I was a middle eastern country right now, i would be very supportive of a government that was trying to get nukes. It seems to be the only way to be treated as a sovereign country.

Since when does rescuing the wounded *unarmed* get a kill on site order.

This was not unfortunate. It was a fucking war crime without kids. The pilot even said that they are unarmed, but picking up a body/wounded more than 5mins after the first firefight (if thats what you call it). That is against every country's rules of engagement there is. The pilot is swearing about getting permission to fire on the van, that is not shooting, has no weapons, and not picking up weapons.

Over 10 years ago, it was apparent that Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power. However, doing so by force would lead to a whole mess of issues (many of which we're dealing with now). So Saddam was left in power but the deck was stacked against him maintaining power. Unfortunately, Saddam is an amazingly resilient and ruthless leader - surviving internal attempts to unseat him. Furthermore, the US was uncomfortable with supporting the Shia element due to possible ties with Iran. And the Kurds were rather happy in their own virtually autonomous state. And so the problem continued without resolution. During that time there were elections, changes in power, and political scandals that continued to delay external action.

Terrorism was a nice little excuse to re-visit the problem. But by then, I have to wonder if any plans that had been made back in the "new world order" days were current enough to invoke. It sure didn't look like it post-invasion.

It seems to me that whoever leaked the video must have been able to view it, since they knew what was on it. So they would have had the video, as well as the decryption keys. If they're going to leak the video, why not leak the keys too?

If you look at the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]'s sources section, there was an investigation conducted by United States Central Command, days after the event occurred. It's entirely possible the video was pulled for review, but while the investigation's contents may have been encrypted and not visible, the index would explain what was on it.

I could see how someone charged with filing and safeguarding the actual data would not possess the actual decryption keys.

You're assuming the keys were in a form that could be easily shared. I very much doubt that military encryption works that way. Having your keys in a file on your PC my be adequate for you and me, but when Blofeld is out to steal your plans for invading Normandy, you need to make it a little harder for him to steal access.

And of course, it wasn't brute force. That approach was obsolete even back in Turing's day.

I'm probably on the other side of the fence on this - I support the actions of the troops in the helicopter and on the ground, and think they made the correct decision given what they knew - and I'll agree with that. Knowledge is always better than ignorance.

Ummm... the Helecoper crew or the people on the ground were not in any actual danger, they were well outside the range of any Russian made shoulder launched missile.

What did they have to lose by not verifying the target.

Many apologists are whitewashing this with the "right decision at the time" BS when it was clearly not the right decision either in hindsight or at the time. The crew had to real impetus to act, in fact the audio indicated that the crew simply wanted to kill something.

In either case, shooting the people taking away the wounded is illegal under both international laws and US rules of engagement. There is no possible way to spin that into "the right decision at the time".

WikiLeaks claims they decrypted the material. While that's certainly possible, we have no way to know if this is true. They might have received it unencrypted, but made these assertions (including the Internet posts requesting supercomputer time) to throw investigators off-track.

They used a farm of PS3s running Linux to crack the encryption. This is why Sony, acting in behalf of the US DOD, removed the "Other OS" installation option and randomly bricked consoles through last week's firmware update, (albeit too late to prevent the video from being released).
Also, as documented in FCC filings, Apple's iPad has a secret built-in front camera used to spy on the American people to find the person who leaked the data. That's why the wifi connection is so poor, most of it is saturated sending live video to DHS.
Finally. Microsoft is also involved somehow. I'm not sure how, but I'm sure the OOXML file format is somehow involved.

Another early attempt to shut down the site involved a United States District Court judge in California. In 2008, Judge Jeffrey S. White ordered the American version of the site shut down after it published confidential documents concerning a subsidiary of a Swiss bank. Two weeks later he reversed himself, in part recognizing that the order had little effect because the same material could be accessed on a number of other "mirror sites."

Judge White said at the time, "We live in an age when people can do some good things and people can do some terrible things without accountability necessarily in a court of law."

yes, Judge, you are obviously doing one of those terrible things without accountability in a court of law when you silence the truth.

Wikileaks lost a lot of respect from me. Instead of actually, you know, leaking the video, they are using it as a campaign with bias.

I fully support the idea of wikileaks. I fully look down on them for the way they released this with an opinionated campaign. They should not be in the job of interpreting their leaks. They should not be in the job of making sites like collateralmurder.com to publicize their leaks. They should be in the business of actually leaking newsworthy items with confidentiality.

5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The word "indiscriminate" in the first line, and "unprovoked" in the second last sentence. Both of those express an opinion as to the *motive* of the attack. That is opinion, it is biased against the soldiers who clearly (listen to the audio) go through the correct chain of command and rules of engagement before opening fire.

Also the term "rescue" and "rescuer" bias the reader that the van that just happened to enter the area with three men who jump out immediately and attempt to put the wounded man into the van while the van is rapidly turning and moving to provide a getaway was some good Samaritan, and not at all involved despite everyone in Iraq knowing to stay away from where the Apaches are circling.

That, and naming the site, "Collateral Murder" as well.

That puts it outside the provenance of just factually "leaking" the data.

A factual release would have been, "5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting a military action in Iraq which resulted in the deaths of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and the riders in a van apparently coming to remove him from the scene. Two young children seated in the van were also seriously wounded in the attack."

The difference is subtle, but important. The factual version lets you decide whether it is indiscriminate or not -- by watching the video. The original version acts as judge and jury on the actions of the Apache crew -- a crew vindicated as meeting all the rules of engagement by a Pentagon review of their actions.

When non-combatants are killed, it is because of a lack of discrimination between combatants and non-combatants. This is "indiscriminate." When a person is killed who posed no threat to the people doing the killing, it is "unprovoked." These are both statements of FACT, which can easily be confirmed by viewing the video. The wording is a summary, not an opinion.

No, it is an after-action summary with near perfect knowledge of the situation. You know, going into the video, that these are non-combatants embedded in a group of combatants. The pilot and gunner did not know this. Under the Rules of Engagement, when some of a group is armed, they are all combatants.

Secondly, the Reuters reporters failed to wear their officially issued retro-reflective "Press" vests, that would have identified them as non-combatants. They made this choice knowing the consequences. Thus, they intentionally, and knowingly, put themselves into a situation where they were endangering their lives. They also had failed to report to Reuters that they would be in the area, or even in the city of Bagdhad. It was only because one of the reporters was talking to a third man on his cell phone that Reuters found out where they were.

Third, recovered from the scene were one (or more) AK-47 fully automatic rifles, and two RPG7 rocket launchers with two warheads. One of the RPG rounds was actually found under the body of the cameraman.

Fourth, also recovered were the two Canon EOS cameras used by the reporters. The last images on the cameraman at the corner (the one found on the RPG round) were beautiful pictures of the lightly armored side of a Humvee about a block away from them. These are included in the investigative report. Were an RPG to have been fired from his position, those American soldiers would have died.

Again, with perfect knowledge, we know that the guy leaning around the corner is holding a camera with a long lens. To an Apache gunner, guarding the convoy below, it looks like a big tube, and the guy is standing over an RPG round (remember, it was found under him) pointing right down the street at the troops the Apache is supposed to be protecting.

That convoy had already received small arms fire (the reason for calling in the Apache air support) and was attempting to move through the area.

Now, consider what the Apache pilot knew. He has been called in to protect an armored column that has been taking fire from insurgents in the area. He (and a second Apache) spot a group of armed men, one holding an RPG (which rules out the idea of "bodyguards" floated so often in this discussion.) approaching the route of the column he's been called in to protect. These men brandish the weapons, and then gather around a blind corner on the route of the column. One of them, apparently holding a long, straight tube, leans around the corner and sights down the tube directly at the column of soldiers.

Still think that "unprovoked" applies? The mere presence of an RPG means that this is not just a bunch of guys taking pictures. So the attack is provoked.

As for "indiscriminate"? Seriously? When the guy is down and wounded, and not carrying a weapon, they do not fire. Admittedly they beg for him to "give them a reason," but they do not fire. "Indiscriminate?" I think not.

At every step of the way, they are getting cleared by commanders watching the same video feed, the commanders have the feed from two different Apaches to make those decisions (and apparently a UAV in the area as well.) We are seeing a single viewpoint. And we can slow-mo and zoom in on the video in a light-controlled office environment, with all the leisure to scroll back and forth and take closer looks. We are not in the heat, light, and adrenaline rush of a helicopter cockpit, buffeted by noise, smoke,and wind, and fearing for the lives of the men below who are counting on us to protect them.

The "FACT" can only come with perfect knowledge after the facts are known, and even then, you have to ignore most of the facts to come to that conclusion.

indiscriminate - not marked by careful distinction : deficient in discrimination and discernment
The US army killed everyone in the group since 1 may have had a gun and 1 may have had an RPG. That may be called prudent even. But it certainly was indiscriminate.

unprovoked - occurring without motivation or provocation
The men on the ground didn't shoot. They weren't close enough to swear at or give the finger. Hell there was no indication that they were aware of the helicopter.

rescuer - a person who rescues you from harm or danger
In this case you are right. Attempted rescuer would be better. I think you could say with confidence in a strict a situation as a legal court that they were rescuers. There was a man laying on the ground riddled with bullets and they tried to drive off with him. Would you describe them as kidnappers?

The title I will give you! It is clearly a leading title.

Though i find it ironic that you don't want wikileaks to act as jury. But you are cool with the us gov acting as judge, jury and executioner in this case. Do remember that the US gov pretty clearly lied about this action in cover up and refused to release the footage. That is pretty evil.

Do note that WikiLeaks spent real money to send real journalists to the actual Iraq to speak to real eyewitnesses and the very children who survived the attack. This was part of the verification process, and I do not see why this additional information gathered to provide context to the video should not also be used to voice some sort of opinion about the ongoing injustices that happen as part of wars. We civilians, removed from the locus of this conflict, tend to marginalize the innocent victims in our own personal evaluations of the war.

FWIW, I don't think that the pilots should ever be punished harshly at this point, as they likely were indeed operating within rules of engagement, as the military concluded. The root cause of the errors lies farther up the chain of command.

Also, remember that this is also about the CYA actions on the part of the military. If they had told Reuters, "Hey, our guys seriously fucked up," and perhaps paid the families of the journalists restitution (which would be the least they could do to somehow attempt to make right), and made significant changes to the rules of engagement, it wouldn't be quite as bad. But of course, this is probably not an isolated incident, and Wikileaks has footage of something in Afghanistan IIRC.

And again, they need money to operate. There is enough of a PR component in all of this that one might consider whether money potentially derived through increased exposure played a factor in this. If so, that's one hell of a calculated gamble.

And, where is the raw video? The timestamps are almost unreadable, it's obviously been reduced in size and re-encoded. Wikileaks put it into a boxed frame with titles and subtitles. The MP4 they provided is larger but is still blurry and obviously not the source video. Why are they not leaking that???

I know Julian Assange slightly. He used to be the sysadmin at Suburbia.net [suburbia.net]. That's where my critic of Scientology [suburbia.net] website lives. He and Mark Dorset of Suburbia have assiduously defended that site against baseless legal threats from Scientology for the past fifteen years. The guy's got balls of titanium.

The newspapers whine about "who's going to do journalism without us around?" The answer is the same as who'll do it with them around, i.e. someone else. So far it's Wikileaks.

I gave 'em GBP50 (~US$100) last pay and will again this pay. So should you.

Remember, we are not seeing what the soldiers see here here. We can watch the video fifty times on slow-mo, squinting to see if that dude's carrying an RPG or a camera: the soldiers are making snap decisions on half-second glimpses. Contrariwise, the soldiers have a much wider perspective on the entire battlefront, and see things we can't. Our hindsight second-guessing is pointless.

But my point here is not to defend the soldiers or the military: it's to say that since hindsight is useless, we should try foresight. BEFORE we send troops into a country, we should understand that shit like this WILL happen. Absolute precision in warfare is impossible: conflict WILL result in innocents getting slaughtered by terrified boys with heavy weapons.

So when the option of war starts being discussed, we should not ask, "is our cause righteous? Are we prepared to sacrifice our sons' lives for it?" but rather, "Is our cause righteous enough that we can watch the mass slaughter of innocents, and still say we did the right thing?"

Nonsense. On my first casual watch-through, I heard them claim 5-6 guys with AKs. My jaw dropped, then I assumed that was chatter from a different site. There was ONE man in the PLENTIFUL video beforehand who had anything long enough to be a rifle, and it was the wrong shape.

It soon became evident that the claim was not chatter from a different site.

I only watched as far as the first salvo - the crime had been committed at that point. I didn't watch the rest of the egregious violations, and I didn't watch it in slo-mo, so my criticisms above aren't about 'heat of battle'. I'm also not a trained killing professional. There was no battle before the US started it. This isn't about 'absolute precision'. This isn't even supposed to be a war at this point, but an occupation.

This is one of the weakest positive identifications in existance, outside of total, utter fabrication.

Wikilieaks have not been playing this up, the media has. And they should. This is what is known as 'an important news story.' The fact that wikileaks is asking for donations is irrelevant. They have always asked for donations, and they don't have control over how popular a leaked document becomes.

Personally, I may not agree with their interpretation of the issue but what makes them different (and, in my opinion, important) is that, regardless of any editorial they may add to the story, they always post all the original material they receive unedited. As long as they do that, I can view it myself and develop my own opinion. What the mainstream media and the military do is highly limit your direct access to the original evidence then tell you to "trust us" that they are giving you an honest description. As this case, and other such as the death of Pat Tillman, the military has proven that, as an organization, they are pathological liers that cannot be trusted.

Did you listen to the radio chatter? Did you read the captions supplied?

Once again, for the obtuse who refuse to look, listen, and think:

That gunship was called in by a ground unit, Hotel 26, which was under fire. Bullets were being fired at a US ground unit from this location. The gunship came in, and cleared away armed personnel. In fact, that reporter was embedded with an enemy unit, just like reporters have been embedded with US forces. The only mistake made in the entire video was the identification of a camera as an RPG.

Personally, if it were my call, I probably wouldn't have fired on the van. I say, "probably". I might have, had I actually been there. But, the van had no internationally recognized markings on it - no Red Cross, no Red Crescent. I saw people in a van aiding and abetting a member of an armed group that had fired upon our side on the ground.

Unless and until you understand that Hotel 26 had taken fire from this area, and almost certainly THESE ARMED PEOPLE, then you have zero understanding of what you saw on the video.

Simply not true. One of the guys had an RPG and is clearly shown in the video with it. In addition, another US unit was under attack one block away.

Which guy, at what point in time in the video? What unit was under attack, one block in which direction exactly? If a unit was under attack, why were the helicopters mowing down civilians instead of helping the unit that was actually receiving fire? Why did none of these supposed enemy combatants try to find cover, if there was gunfire going on? Why did they not react to the presence of US military helicopters?

On the 17 minute video posted on Youtube, during seconds 3:45-6 you can clearly see someone separate from the two journos with an RPG-7 launcher. It's not a tripod or a camera, those were carried by other people.

The camera with long lens looks like a camera with a long lens. In the panic of war, it might look like an RPG to someone who wants to see an RPG.
We know that they were civilians becase we can see what the gunner saw. We can see without a shadow of doubt that the 'ambulance' driver was unarmed. We can see that the wounded photographer was unarmed.
We can see the time the bullets took to get to the target, which indicate that, at Gatling gun speeds, the helicopter is about 1km away.
We can hear the guy desperate to kill the wounded photographer.
We can hear the gunner lying to the base about the shots being fired, about there being more than 1 or 2 armed men, about the ambulance 'picking up bodies'
It's not an offence to bear arms in Iraq- all sorts of bodyguards do it. (where have I heard that before?)
We can read the lies that the US forces issued the next day.
It's a bit more than 'some classified information'
It shows that the US forces are a) over-brutalised b) incapable of performing a police action in a busy city.

I dispute the "clearly shown" part, but there was definitely a guy holding something about the size and shape of an AK-47. In the ~18-minute video embedded on BoingBoing [boingboing.net], look at the guy just above the crosshair at 3:39, and the guy left of him; those are the probable AKs that I see. Comments in the video refer to these people being near US ground forces: 4:28 in the video, "he was right in front of the Brad".

Considering the released report claims the ground troops actually found these weapons at the scene, as well as the cameras which apparently contained photos of the Bradley, the narrative that the photographers were walking around with a group of people who were intending to do violence to US forces and were near US ground forces seems at least adequately supported.

If you want to know why they weren't ducking and covering, did you see the delay between the gun firing and the hits? The bullets must have been in the air a good 2 seconds. That puts the person shooting like a kilometer away! The guys on the ground probably had no idea where the shots came from. They were too busy looking at the Bradley right next to them, and thought they were perfectly shielded.

The audio track is certainly pretty ugly, and what happened to the kids in the van is tragic -- but in context it all seems pretty understandable. Once it was decided that this war would be fought, there were bound to be tragic incidents like this.

I am, at the moment, willing to believe the government line that this was a small number of civilian casualties in the heat of battle, and I'm a lot unhappier about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. If this is what it takes to get people talking about the real issues again, fine, but I don't see that this is one of those issues. This is the cost of war. Apparently there was probably an ROE violation when they shot the van -- which is sad, and the attitude of the soldiers is ugly, but this is no My Lai massacre.

The military investigation that followed this event found that there were no AK-47s and no RPGs, just cameras with long lenses.

As was pointed out at 3:45 - 3:46 in the short video and a capture posted by another person: http://i41.tinypic.com/343tb0j.jpg [tinypic.com] -- that's either an RPG or a collapsed tripod with a conical camera on top.

They seem to play up the soldiers admittedly unprofessional humor about the shooting. While it is atrocious, it is also one of the things that is required of a soldier. To be able to follow an order to attack, a soldier has to be able to think it isn't bad. Psychological issues arise if they don't. It's one of those things I just consider better that I don't see.

I've watched the video and I'm sorry but I thought those were weapons in their hands as well. RPG and AK's in a zone that you are trying to clear out? Check. Light 'em up. The guys shooting were wrong about the weapons and that sucks. The real issue here is the verification of danger.
Of course when you unleash a force to stop all other potential force, people are going end up killing each other.

I've watched the video and I'm sorry but I thought those were weapons in their hands as well. RPG and AK's in a zone that you are trying to clear out? Check. Light 'em up. The guys shooting were wrong about the weapons and that sucks. The real issue here is the verification of danger. Of course when you unleash a force to stop all other potential force, people are going end up killing each other.

Maybe. But the van? That was a guy helping an unarmed wounded man. Firing on that guy was against the law. Plain and simple. Geneva conventions and UN conventions. You can't shoot unarmed wounded people who pose no risk to you. Not to mention people that come to their aid.

Well the long video I saw on wikileaks shows the infantry talking about an RPG round under a body. The helicopter pilot/gunner also claims to spot someone with an RPG at the very beginning, but the hell if I can see it.

Didn't watch the short video, they might have cut the infantry out altogether. But it's hard to claim selective editing when, you know, the uncut version is presented as well.

It's pretty thin but pretty much by presenting an abridged version you are showing the facts you want people to see. It is not unjustified to assume that most people would watch the 15m assume that it is the important and relevant bits rather than watch the full 40m video.

I do think you'd have to be a complete idiot to drive into a battle with your kids,

Yeah, that would be dumb.

Of course it isn't what happened, they were driving through their neighbourhood, (taking their children to school) didn't see or even hear any fighting (the apaches were over a kilometer away) and found some wounded people. They tried to help. Then they got shot. What battle?

You keep telling yourself that blowing up a van full of people helping wounded people is justifiable. I watched the video, and I can see some justification for the initial shooting, but the van is completely indefensible. Only a mouth breathing sock puppet sociopath would try to defend the actions of that trigger happy gunner.

Anyone whose empathy has been so destroyed that they can laugh at another person's mortal suffering is too messed up to fit into normal society.

I'd actually say that's societies fault.. Society, especially American/Western has removed the daily activity of death and dying from the average person. Showing dead bodies on TV is no longer common place in American news, or it's branded as 'Too Disturbing'.. it's not disturbing.. it's how the friggen universe works.. people die.. get over it.

You don't think Undertakers and Medical Examiners laugh at mortality too? They just happen to work with it all day long.. People that work with food all day long laugh about hair in your food.. I'm work in computing..and you don't think I don't laugh about people that can't do what I consider 'simple things'?

Who gives a shit what weapons it had? The actions of the men in the van indicated that they were allied with the men on the ground. That made them legitimate targets, especially when they started removing evidence/intel from the scene. If they really were picking up the weapons also - as the guy in the video indicates - that just provides even more justification for shooting them, but it's certainly not required.

So let me get this straight -- your claim is that an unarmed person rendering aid to wounded people on the ground makes the good Samaritan a "legitimate target" undeserving of sympathy when he gets mowed down by gunfire from a helicopter?

I'll try to keep that in mind if I ever see you struggling at the scene of an accident.

It's not why they did anything, but how they did it. They have employees, need to pay for servers and other services. If some organization in the world should get donations, it's Wikileaks. Even democratic nations should support them, but I can clearly see why not. Instead even US tries to shut them down and have been spying and interrogating their workers.

The article states they posted this three months ago:“Have encrypted videos of U.S. bomb strikes on civilians. We need super computer time,"

They need it. They should get attention and money for trying to investigate and report much needed transparency in government. As opposed to most news outlets which have turned into spineless shadows of journalism. I hope this sparks demand for the rebirth of investigatory journalism.

I hope they find who did it and erect a statue in his honor. Sometime breaking the law is the only way to get justice. This video was not classified for any legitimate reason except to cover someone's ass.

I hope they find out who leaked this and put them in a locked cell. Releasing classified material puts all of our American soldiers in danger -- not to mention our country.

Explain to me how the release of this particular video puts all of our American soldiers in danger. Do you understand the difference between classified and 'military sensitive'? Do you realize that some (not all) things marked as 'classified' are done so just to cover some ass?

I can understand the difference between leaking, for example, the engineering details (and possible achille's heel) of one of our military pieces of equipment, or security details regarding the protection of our nuclear plants and leaking a video that has no security value beyond PR damage control.

You are just sensationalizing a logical fallacy, in a very highschoolish fashion. Pure hand waving. Not buying it.

I hope they find out who leaked this and put them in a locked cell. Releasing classified material puts all of our American soldiers in danger -- not to mention our country.

How? Were we counting on the terrorists thinking they would be completely safe, on base if you will, if they were unarmed, in a van with kids? Or are you implying the bad guys didn't know we had helicopters with guns?

Explicit guidance exists that you are not to classify something just because it is embarrassing. What national secret is protected by classifying this video? Security Guidance says that the use of the SECRET classification is to prevent harm to the security of the US.

I believe an investigation needs to be opened into the misuse of classification for this video.

Interesting. The only thing I'd disagree with at that linked site is that journalists are fair game if they are embedded with enemy forces. You can't shoot journalists just because you don't like the side they are reporting from.

If they don't wish to be targets, they should be wearing a designated fluorescent press vest, specifically issued to journalists in Iraq to prevent exactly what happened here. Because they were not wearing this identification, they became part of the group of insurgents. Insurgents in Iraq often use cameras to take pictures of their attacks for propaganda purposes.

The pictures recovered from their cameras show that they were sitting one block from a group of vehicles that were under small arms fire. The perfect place from which to launch an RPG attack. The cameraman was even found lying on top of an RPG round. All that can be found in the report and sworn statements of the soldiers who came on scene.

This is plus five INFORMATIVE? mypetjawa is a site dedicated to catching Muslim terrorists that it calls "Jawa" (aka, a racial slur). Their decision that the video was a hoax was because someone had an AK-47, therefore the soldiers were totally justified. Are there really 5 conservatives that couldn't RTFA linked by this AC? Jesus Christ people.

As the sibling post notes, the Fox News article mentions that the truck that pulled up was unmarked. No red cross/crescent, no "ambulance", no nothing. If they're assuming that the people they just killed were enemy combatants because they had AKs and RPGs, then the next logical assumption is that the unmarked van that pulls up is affiliated with those people and is therefore also a target.

First of all, this wasn't a war zone. It was a neighborhood. They hadn't cleared all the civilians out, and had no reasonable assumption that everyone still on the streets was an enemy. Also, this part of the raid, during the surge, was a complete surprise. They intended to flush out insurgents, and knew full well that they would be intermixed with civilians. They should have been MORE cautious, not less.

So you're saying the chopper needs to have an RPG shot at it before it can engage the enemy?

That's actually what the Rules of Engagement say as well. Shots have to be fired, or at least threatened, before PID is possible and engagement is legal. Wikileaks has them, go read them for yourself.

In my opinion...

Light them all up is the last thing that would go through any sane persons mind.

Watch the rest, then go back and put the first part in context. Look at the 'bongo truck' situation. Or that poor bastard walking in front of the building when it takes a missile. Or all the rubber-neck-ers who bite it when the next two missiles hit. Did they deserve to die as well? Boondoggle, from start to finish.

So when people carry weapons in public, we immediately assume they are enemy combatants? I know there was fighting in the area: you still have ZERO proof these were insurgents.

I would assume that most Iraqi civilians are armed for self defense. There are plenty of stories about Iraqis using their own guns -- even AK-47s -- to fend of insurgents trying to kidnap them or plant bombs. The "RPG" you keep pointing out looks a lot like a pro camera lens to me. And there is zero evidence that these people were engaged in any warfare, or about to fire an RPG: the pilots made that shit up.

Finally, this quote from your link: "But you drive your van into an active military engagement?" As I understand it, most of Baghdad in 2007 was pretty dangerous. A passing family would have little idea of how recently a group of people were shot. For all we know, they were in the process of fleeing an active engagement elsewhere, saw wounded Iraqis in a scene that appeared calm at the moment, and attempted to rescue them. The link says "You are stupid. Innocent, but stupid. You're asking to be killed." -- you might as well call all Iraqi civilians that, then. Why live in Iraq at all? Let's move them to the U.S.

What disturbs me is how quickly people judge a video when they were two airships meaning you're only seeing one view from one of the apaches. Other people are calling in RPGs and AK47s... and those that were pulling the triggers were acting on that information. Personally, from watching the video, I saw very unfortunate movement by a photographer with a very large camera (405-415 on the wikileaks site) that at first looks exactly like an insurgent with an RPG trying to get an unseen angle on a gunship. Only after I was told that they were photographers was my imagination allowed to see that as a very large lens camera (and you conveniently can't see those frames where the RPG looks more like a camera at the site you linked to). And even then, with the low resolution Youtube footage, who's to say what it looked like to those there? Missing something like that could cost not only your life but also the lives of people flying with you.

I'm not trying to excuse what happened but I am saying that a series of mistakes were most likely made in those videos that lead to the unfortunate deaths of at least a couple innocent people.

And this is war.

If you're a United States citizen, you paid for that gunship. You paid for that scenario. Don't get me wrong, you also paid for the scenario when real insurgents trying to kill innocent people were stopped. That scenario just isn't interesting to us though. You see it as a byline on a newspaper but those stories are just something to yawn at these days. I was for the war in Afghanistan and I knew that things like this video would happen. I was not for the Iraq war because these scenarios were not worth ousting Saddam. Friendly fire happened in Desert Storm and probably every large scale conflict before that as long as guns have been involved. Do you think a reporter was never killed accidentally by United States forces in Vietnam or even World War II (commonly viewed as one of the few 'justified' war)?

I'm glad everyone got to see one of the faces of war. I'm sad that these people wrongfully died but I'm glad that this rightful outrage might cause us to really reconsider what half or more of us had decided when our elected Commander in Chief brought us into both these wars. I don't get it. I was ~20 years old during our invasion of Afghanistan and people just seemed humdrum "Hey, let's go to war, I won't be dying in it" and I'm still a little bit confused about that sentiment. How many of these conflicts must we have before we realize that declaring war means that civilians -- not just soldiers but women and children -- will die as some direct result of this war?

War is war. At some point the US populace just decided that war is different today. And then once we started two wars, we forgot about them. Just declared victory and tucked them away. Our soldiers are still dying, this is still happening. Wake up.

And lastly, I would like to point out that like soldiers, these reporters did know what they were entering when they entered a war zone. Again, not to absolve the Coalition forces but to quote Reuter's official word [reuters.com] on the footage:

There is no better evidence of the dangers each and every journalist in a war zone faces at any time.

You are correct, I did pay for that gunship with my tax dollars. I also paid for the training of those soldiers. Finally, the world opinion of America and Americans (including me) is affected by how we fight in Iraq.

So I feel I am justified in seeking an answer to this question:

What policy is in place that considers shooting an obvious makeshift ambulance a good idea?

Everything up to that point is a terrible misunderstanding. Having watched the video, if I were looking for AK47s and RPGs instead of cameras, I would have seen them. I'm not even going to second guess if the way to build a healthy Iraq is to destroy a group of people standing in a street with gunfire from a mile away, though I don't think that's the decision I would make.

But as for the van: everyone on the radio is clear that the van is picking up wounded. Very seriously wounded. Permission to fire was still asked for, and still given. Why? Even if everyone involved was 100% convinced those were bad guys, why? If this kind of conflict could be won purely by being the meanest guy on the block, Algeria would still be French.

But as for the van: everyone on the radio is clear that the van is picking up wounded. Very seriously wounded. Permission to fire was still asked for, and still given. Why? Even if everyone involved was 100% convinced those were bad guys, why?

The Apache crew lied about the van. Just plain lied.

"Yeah Bushmaster we have a van that's approaching and picking up the bodies" - lie. The van hadn't yet even stopped. No one had picked up anything whatsoever when this was radioed into the man making the firing decisions.

"...possibly picking up bodies and weapons..." - lie. They never got within 15 feet of where the alleged weapons were blown to smithereens by the 30 mil fire.

So the permission to engage was based on a falsehood. The Apache team depicted the van as belonging to the same group of individuals, and as attempting to some how hide what had happened, or something.

Further it seems that Bushmaster Seven was assuming they would disable the truck. They did a hell of a lot more than that. They actively pursued every moving person with rounds, trying to kill as many as possible.

This clearly did not meet with the minimum necessary force guideline within the Rules of Engagement, and it seems that Bushmaster Seven was checking to see if they had successfully disabled the truck.

You know what's funny about that opinion piece? It is wrong. That is NOT an RPG, those are NOT AK-47s. I can understand why someone would think so, but they are obviously not, I know a telephoto lensed camera profile when I see one. Also since when does embedding yourself with a group, as a reporter, make YOU an enemy combatant? I reported on a group of local homeless crack users in HS, does that make ME a homeless crack head? I would also like to ask, when has reporting on a CRIME committed by armed forces made you anti-American? Not to mention that you have to be attacked or protecting US Forces under attack to engage an enemy group according to the US Rules of Engagement, violating those rules IS in fact a crime under military law. Also if you listen you will hear the pilot lie, saying they were under RPG fire, he said this AFTER practically begging for permission to shoot. So, where is this RPG? Watch the video again, carefully, before you show yourself to be an even bigger idiot than they guy who posted the above article.

They continue to identify the zoom lens being pointed around a corner as an RPG. It was a LENS! In any case, these guys were not taking aim at US troops or the helicopters. They were just standing around. Those guys with AK-47s could be bodyguards for the reporters, for all you know.

If this attack by the Apache helicopter was pre-emptive, then it easily could have been made by ground-interception by nearby US troops. These half-dozen would have had no hope facing Bradley IFVs and their mounted and heavily armed infantry.

First of all, they do identify the lens that goes around the corner as an RPG:

He ducks behind this building. Then a few seconds later he sees someone down on the ground with something that looks like it could be an RPG.

Could that be the Reuters photojournalist with a long lense? [sic] Maybe. But from what the pilot is seeing the man seems like a threat. In war you eliminate threats.

"Jawa Report" is biased toward the war-fighter. They have no reason to believe that the lens is an RPG -- they assume that the warfighter is correct. It is plainly not an RPG.

Second of all:

This screenshot is at 3:35. This guy is definitely carrying a weapon. In motion it looks like it might be a rifle, but from the profile angle snapped below it looks like an RPG.

A few seconds later at 3:50 he puts the weapon down. The weapon is long enough that it's comes up well beyond his waist and it certainly has the width of an RPG. Or at least from this angle it looks that way.

I think it looks like a rifle. They are biased toward the viewpoint of the war fighter -- they trust his judgment even though they have no reason to believe that that looks like an RPG at all.

I think what is more important is the following statement:

Let alone embed with the enemy. Whatever happened to the good old fashioned military pool reporter? Alas, gone out with the era of the dinosaurs and when "supporting the troops" actually meant, you know, supporting the troops.

"Jawa Report" does not believe it is healthy to question the troops as long as they're killing people that Jawa thinks are terrorists, which is any random person with a guy in Baghdad, apparently. They are about supporting whatever efforts the military determines on its own are necessary.

That's fine if that's their approach, but to suggest that these guys are journalists and that this posts offers facts about what happened is allowing them to take the wheel and drive. I think that Americans are owed the opportunity to see with our own eyes what we're doing/what we did over there.

If those links are legit, it's probably OpenSSL with the 8 bytes of salt included. So you just have to brute force the password with the given salt. You don't even have to decrypt the whole file - do the first 16 bytes or so and look for a legit file header. I doubt they stripped the header. Send the first 16 bytes to a file identification tool or something like VLC so you don't have to even program that part.

I don't think this is revealing any secrets any idiot could have found on his own - they needed supercomputer time (or something equivalent) to brute-force it, just like everyone's reporting. I'm an idiot and I found it.

Why do the encrypted files always start with "Salted__" ("U2FsdGVkX1" in base64)? Isn't giving away information like this insecure?

The encrypted files must always start with "Salted__" to interoperate with OpenSSL. OpenSSL expects this. The 8 bytes that spell "Salted__" are always immediately followed by another random 8 bytes of salt. The encrypted stream starts at the 17th byte. This way, even if you use the same password to encrypt 2 different files, the actual secret keys used to encrypt these 2 files are very different.

Wow, okay.. that's a lot better. It's an openssl encrypted file (magic=53 61 6c 74 65 64 5f 5f, "Salted__"). Most likely it was DES or RC4 encrypted if they were able to decrypt in 3 months. I only downloaded the first few kb...

So, uh, NOT MILITARY GRADE ENCRYPTION, but perhaps encrypted by someone in the military.

Except for the guy with the AK-47 [mypetjawa.mu.nu] (3:43 in the video) and the guy with the RPG [mypetjawa.mu.nu] (3:35 in the video). The guy with the RPG ducks behind the building, and then someone (could be the same guy or maybe the cameraman -- it's hard to tell) points *something* around the corner of the building at the approaching Bradley vehicles that had just been engaged in a firefight minutes before (necessitating calling in the air support).

I'm sorry you can't see it, but the rules of engagement were followed. Two Reuters reporters decided to embed themselves with a group of people who were armed in a combat zone. Bad things happened. In retrospect, it was a sad situation. Hindsight being 20-20 and all.

In the heat of the moment, everything they did was checked and re-checked by their command chain to coincide with the rules of engagement. The audio shows they were repeatedly requesting permission up the command chain for the clear to fire. Commanders reviewed the information available against the rules of engagement, and determined they should be allowed to fire. That's why they were determined to have complied with those rules in this situation.

Just because Wikileaks can now review the video in "super-zoom" and "super-slo-mo" and determine that the pilots and gunners might have been able to discern whether the reporters were carrying cameras on straps instead of guns on straps does not make them liable for murder. It doesn't change the fact that these were people walking in a combat zone, with other people who had weapons, and were standing in a position waiting for a column of American vehicles to come into range.

Occam's razor does not say, "These were murderous thugs," Occam's Razor says, "This was a sad situation that occurred in the 'fog of war'."

What they initially took to be an RPG was actually [timesonline.co.uk] the camera. I can't find the original news article I read, but it quoted a US military source as admitting as much.

Early in the tape, released by the whistleblowers’ website Wikileaks.org, Mr Noor-Eldeen is seen from the co-pilot’s perspective crouching on a street corner in Baghdad’s Sadr City, partly hidden by a low house but with his telephoto lens visible. “He’s got an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade launcher],” the co-pilot says. “I’m going to fire.”

And as for military procedure, they behaved like a bunch of trigger happy cowboys playing a video game. They were itching to fire and blast away, and were just looking for a reason to do it. There was no desire for clear information; they made assumptions that favoured the desire for action. Instead of verifying that there was an RPG, they immediately decided it was. The van that rocked up to take away the bodies could have been a makeshift ambulance - there was no signs of its occupants being armed - but they just immediately assumed it was hostile, and shot. They were urging the wounded Iraqi to pick up a weapon so they could kill him. Later, when they fired the first missile into the building, it was quite clear that a civilian had come into frame before firing, yet he shot anyway. The second missile was fired even though again, quite clearly, you can see civilians gathering outside the building to try help the wounded. Again, they fired without any consideration to innocents being nearby.

They demonstrate a callous disregard for the very human lives that they were supposedly trying to help/save, and clearly wanted to any excuse to open fire. And I doubt the fog of war really applies here since they weren't being fired on, so they could've taken their time to make good judgements.

No, the point I cited in the video clearly shows a loaded RPG. It's even clearer in the full size MP4 unedited version.

And the cameraman was found by the soldiers lying on top of an RPG round. But that doesn't fit your view.

Were the pilots a bit gung-ho? Yes, they were. That's how you get a soldier past the fact that they're chopping up other human beings. It's a part of soldiering.

As for the van? Once again, you miss the context. Insurgents in Iraq often arrived in vans to collect wounded, weapons, and ammo to make any dead appear to be innocent civilians. This was well known to the Apache pilot, the gunner, and their chain of command. They didn't just "fire wildly" at the van. If you listen to the unedited video, they repeatedly ask their chain of command for a clear to fire. Their commanders were watching the video from two Apache helicopters and a UAV and made the decision that this appeared to be an insurgent group retrieving their wounded and weapons, and gave the order to fire.

The two men who attempt to load the guy into the van came from the same place the other insurgents had come from, not from the van itself. The guy in the van clearly knew who they were, knew he was in a combat zone (watch him trying to move the van to line it up for a getaway once they were loaded, almost running one of them over) and he made the choice to be there and to put his kids in danger.

Once the soldiers arrive, they continue to come under small arms fire, even while trying to rescue the wounded.

It's a war, hard decisions are made, and "under fire" doesn't necessarily mean they're shooting at you but it could mean your friends are taking fire.

Seriously, have you watched the video? Have you listened to the audio? Do you understand anything about military engagements? Did you read the report? Did you look at the pictures of the scene with the AK-47 and the RPG rounds and the pictures of the American soldiers a block away and under fire?

What this video shows seems brutal because you are not exposed to military situations on a daily basis. Try to put yourself in their shoes *with no preconceptions*. While watching the video imagine that your family is walking down that street and that these people may be trying to kill them. Then watch the video in a windy, noisy, hot, shaking location (maybe in a car with the windows down and the heat cranked up and the radio blaring.) Now decide whether the guy leaning around the corner and pointing and sighting along a big long tube at your family is a valid target. Now decide if you'd pull the trigger or not, knowing that, if you're wrong, your whole family is dead.

What you're engaging in is damn Monday Morning Quarterbacking at its worst.

If this were the entirety of the video, your position might be deemed rational.

What about the poor bastard on the sidewalk when that building takes a missile hit? Or all the lookie-loo's who die after the second and third missiles. Or the six families that allegedly lived there at the time?

And of course the 'bongo truck'. You know, the one that never demonstrated intent to pickup anything but wounded? The one that was utterly destroyed, and all those surrounding it slaughtered - both against the Rules of Engagement, I might add.

In the entire context, please defend your position:

Occam's razor does not say, "These were murderous thugs," Occam's Razor says, "This was a sad situation that occurred in the 'fog of war'."

Because to me it looks like willful blindness, at a minimum. They lied to Bushmaster Seven to get permission to fire on that truck. They only suggested going to missile fire when they ran out of normal rounds. And you're going to tell me these men are neither 'murderous' nor 'thugs'?

I'm not bashing them because they used to be military, by the way. I'm bashing them because they lost their honor, disobeyed orders, and made all the good and decent fighting men and women around them complicit in their crimes.

And in that light, why the hell would you, or anyone, want to defend them?